Modern Knowledge Vindicates the Bible
THE Bible claims to be the word of the one true God, Jehovah. “All scripture is inspired of God.” (2 Tim. 3:16, NW) Obviously that claim presupposes the existence of the Bible’s Author. Does modern knowledge vindicate faith that God really exists? It does.
As reasoning creatures we know that every effect has a competent cause. So as we note the immensity, order and design of the starry heavens as viewed through the eye of Mount Palomar’s lens, as we note the marvels and beauties of nature visible to our naked eye, and as we consider the world made visible by means of the electronic microscope, we cannot escape the conclusion that all this effect must indeed have a cause in which resides infinite power and wisdom.
As man learns more and more about his own body, how its various systems function and co-operate with one another, how it produces enzymes and hormones, how its brain works, etc., he has ever stronger reason for the conclusion that this most wonderful machine of all simply could not be the product of chance or of a blind force lacking intelligence, such as “nature.”
And as we consider the many co-ordinations imperative for man to exist on the earth, the earth’s distance from the sun, the rate at which the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its own axis, the composition of earth’s atmosphere, the distance the moon is from the earth, the way the vegetable and the animal realms complement each other in the production and use of oxygen and carbon dioxide, we ask, How could all of these factors, and many others, have chanced to occur on one planet? They could not, and therefore they give ample proof that, to use the words of A. Cressy Morrison, past president of New York Academy of Sciences, Man does not stand alone. Truly, in the light of all this evidence, to say there is no God constitutes one a fool.—Ps. 14:1.
Does modern knowledge as completely vindicate faith in the authenticity of the Bible as it does faith in the existence of the Supreme Being, Jehovah God? It does.
God’s Word, the Bible, does not give the age of the universe; modern knowledge only recently doubled its estimate, from 1.8 billion years to 3.5 billion years. In the preparation of the earth for man, modern knowledge has verified the order given in the Bible, beginning with the appearance of light, then land, then vegetation, and then sea creatures, fowl and land animals and finally man. The evidence of geology does not confirm the theory of evolution, but, to quote the late French scientist Lecomte du Nouy, has “all the unsatisfactory characteristics of absolute creation.” (Human Destiny, pages 72, 75, 79) Paleontology supports the Bible’s statement that God caused the earth to bring forth the various animals ‘each after his kind.’ (Gen. 1:21, 24, 25) The late Lucien Cuenot, one of France’s outstanding biologists, wrote that “the evolutionary sap no longer circulates,” thereby admitting that at present there is no evidence of evolution; and shortly before his death he discarded the evolution theory altogether, to the great consternation of his scientific colleagues. Since, according to Sir Arthur Keith and Professor D. M. S. Watson, the only alternative to the evolution theory is “special creation,” as recorded in the Bible, Lucien Cuenot was thereby throwing his weight in favor of the Bible.
The Bible states that with Jehovah God is the fountain of life. (Ps. 36:9) Man at one time thought that life began by “spontaneous generation,” but now he knows that all life comes from precedent life, termed the “law of biogenesis.”
Men of science in times past held that the flood of Noah’s day was merely local in scope, but modern knowledge, particularly as represented in geology and archaeology, gives evidence that the world of the mammoths and other like monsters had a cataclysmic end, and scientists have found in Italy, Switzerland, England and the United States, “even on the tops of high mountains, whole trees sunk deep under ground, as also teeth and bones of animals, fishes entire, seashells, ears of corn, etc., petrified”; which could never have come there but by a world-wide deluge.—Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.
Modern knowledge also vindicates the wisdom of many of the features of the law of Moses. Among the animals that were forbidden as food was the pig, which is subject to trichinosis; the rabbit, which is subject to tularemia; certain fish, which are subject to tapeworms, etc. Meats were inspected, and could not be eaten if over two days old. No animal that died of itself was to be eaten; victims of certain diseases were quarantined; sanitation was made compulsory.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many critics of the Bible arose and attacked its many historical features, but modern knowledge has confounded the Bible’s critics and vindicates it. Says J. G. Duncan in Accuracy of Old Testament in Light of Recent Palestinian Archaeology: “I do not think it will be long possible, even if it is now possible, for us to deny the remarkable accuracy of detail in the narratives of the Old Testament. Incidents hitherto regarded as legend have been proved historical by recent discovery. . . . There is actual history at the back of all of the narratives.” And says the late Sir Frederic Kenyon, in his The Bible and Archaeology: “Archaeology has not yet said its last word; but the results already achieved confirm what faith would suggest, that the Bible can do nothing but gain from an increase of knowledge.”
Because the original manuscripts of the Bible are not extant many have challenged the authenticity of the extant copies. But in recent years papyrus manuscripts of the Christian Greek Scriptures have been discovered that go back so close to the date of the originals that, as Sir Kenyon expresses it, “the authenticity and the general integrity of the Books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.” Striking proof of authenticity of the “Old Testament” was discovered in 1947, in the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah, which, save for a few minor variations, was found to be identical with the best Masoretic text, although written a thousand years earlier. A thousand years of copying with no appreciable difference in text!
Truly, modern knowledge vindicates the Bible.